M, Page 87. Highland Weddings
The weddings were the delight of all ages. Persons from
ten years of age to four score attended them. Some weeks previous to the
marriage-day, the bride and bridegroom went round their respective
friends, to the distance of many miles, for the purpose of inviting them
to the wedding. To repay this courtesy, the matrons of the invited
families returned the visit within a few days, always well supplied with
presents of beef, bams, butter, cheese, spirits, malt, and whatever they
thought necessary for the ensuing feast. These, with what the guests paid
for their entertainment, and the gifts presented the day after the
marriage, were often so considerable, as to contribute much to the future
settlement of the young couple. On the wedding-morning, the bridegroom,
escorted by a party of friends, and preceded by pipers, commenced a round
of morning calls, to remind their invited friends of their engagements.
This circuit sometimes occupied several hours, and as many joined the
party, it might perhaps be increased to some hundreds, when they returned
to the bridegroom's house. The bride went a similar round among her
friends. The bridegroom gave a dinner to his friends, and the bride to
hers. During the whole day, the fiddlers and pipers were in constant
employment. The fiddlers played to the dancers in the house, and the
pipers to those in the field.
[Playing the bagpipes within doors is a Lowland and
English custom. In the Highlands the piper is always in the open air; and
when people wish to dance to his music, it is on the green, if the weather
permits; nothing but necessity makes them attempt a pipe dance in the
house. The bagpipe was a field instrument intended to call the clans to
arms, and animate them in battle, and was no more intended for a house,
than a round of six-pounders. A broadside from a first rate, or a round
from a battery, has a sublime and impressive effect at a proper distance.
In the same manner, the sound of the bagpipe, softened by distance, had an
inde-scribable effect on the minds and actions of the Highlanders. But as
few would choose to be under the muzzle of the guns of a ship of the line
or of a battery when in full play, so I have seldom seen a Highlander,
whose ears were not grated when close to pipes, however much his breast
might be warmed, and his feelings roused, by the sounds to which he had
been accustomed in his youth, when proceeding from the proper distance.]
The ceremony was generally performed after dinner.
Sometimes the clergyman attended, sometimes they waited on him : the
latter was preferred, as the walk to his house with such a numerous
attendance added to the eclat of the day. On these occasions the young men
supplied themselves with guns and pistols, with which they kept up a
constant firing. This was answered from every hamlet as they passed along,
so that, with streamers flying, pipers playing, the constant firing from
all sides, and the shouts of the young men, the whole had the appearance
of a military array passing, with all the noise of warfare, through a
hostile country. The young couple never met on the wedding-day till they
came before the clergyman, when the marriage rites were performed, with a
number of ceremonies too minute to particularize. One of these was to
untie all the strings and bindings on the person of the bridegroom;
nothing to be bound on that occasion, but the one indissoluble knot, which
death only could dissolve. The bride was not included in this injunction.
She was supposed to be so pure and true, that infidelity on her part was
not contemplated. Such were the peculiar notions and delicacy of thinking
among a people esteemed rude and uncultivated. As all these ceremonies,
which were very numerous and very innocent, added much to the cheerfulness
and happiness of the young people, I cannot avoid regretting their partial
disuse. Nor can I help preferring a Highland wedding, where I have myself
been so happy, and seen so many blithe countenances and eyes sparkling
with delight, to such weddings as that of the Laird of Drum, ancestor of
the Lord Sommerville, when he married a daughter of Sir James Bannatyne of
Corhouse. On that occasion, sanctified by the puritanical cant of the
times, there was "one marquis, three earls, two lords, sixteen barons, and
eight ministers present at the solemnity, but not one musician ; they
liked yet better the bleating of the calves of Dan and Bethel, the
ministers' long-winded, and sometimes nonsensical graces, little to
purpose, than all musical instruments of the sanctuaries, at so solemn an
occasion, which, if it be lawful at all to have them, certainly it ought
to be upon a wedding-day, for divertisement to the guests, that innocent
recreation of music and dancing being much more warrantable, and far
better exercise than drinking and smoking of tobacco, wherein the holy
brethren of the Presbyterian (persuasion) for the most part employed
themselves, without any formal health, or remembrance of their friends, a
nod with the head, or a sign with the turning up of the white of the eye,
served for the ceremony.'' [Memoirs of the Sommerville Family.] Such was a
Scotch wedding towards the end of the seventeenth, and such, I hope, will
not be Highland weddings of the nineteenth century, although now seldom
countenanced by the presence of chiefs and landlords, as modern manners
preserve a greater distance than in former days, when a more cordial
communication subsisted between the higher and lower orders.
